Automatic Detection of Apathy using Acoustic Markers extracted from Free Emotional Speech

Apathy is a frequent neuropsychiatric syndrome in people with dementia. It leads to diminished motivation for physical, cognitive and emotional activity. Apathy is highly underdiagnosed since its criteria have been only recently established and rely heavily on the subjective evaluation of human observers. In this paper we analyse speech samples from demented people with and without apathy. Speech was provoked by asking patients two emotional questions. Acoustic features were extracted and used in a classification task. The resulting models show performances of AUC = 0:71 and AUC = 0:63. This is a decent first step into the direction of automatic detection of apathy from speech. Usefulness of stimuli to elicit free speech is found to depend on patients gender.